• Owl [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    As the funding dries up (for all the reasons everyone else said), investors are going to start pulling their money out of the least profitable businesses first. So all of the web businesses are trying to squeeze their users a little more than the others, so they can be slightly more profitable than the others, so they're not next on the chopping block. And all of them are doing this, so they're in a race to squeeze their users more than the other companies.

    And investors are also kind of dumb and have their own capitalist class biases about what should be profitable, so companies can make themselves look better to investors by performatively cutting costs, squeezing customers, and appearing ruthless, regardless of whether those things actually will help the bottom line.